Definitive solution to IPMI over LAN with Dell iDrac Express

I have this bunch of Dell R610, with iDrac6 Express management cards. I used
these, among other things, for developing IPMI support in NUT and working on
Infrastructure & Cloud power management. But that's the topic of another
post (still, if you're interested in, check this and
that).

The thing is that this "IPMI" monitoring development has been limited to
local support (Ie, power supplies can't be monitored remotely by the nut-ipmipsu driver), due to an issue : any attempt to enable IPMI
access over the network was miserably failing!

Well, these attempts were limited to a couple of 15 minutes runs, without
plain motivation, almost a year ago. The various firmwares were up to date
(iDrac 1.70, ...) , everything was running and configured fine, locally. But
still... no IPMI available through the network!

Looking on the Net, I've learned that many Dell customers with iDrac Express
cards, were having the same issue. Dell support seems to have replaced tons of
motherboards! There, I switched to other things, and time has passed....

A good year later (last week), I decided that it was time to get back on
this. And I've found the solution there

Incredible: this was due to a 'bug' in the Broadcom NetXtreme II LoM
(LAN on
Motherboad) firmware! I've not had time to dig this issue in depth, but
here is a base explanation, for what it's worth: Some LoM initial self tests
are failing. Thus, the LoM are not switched to the managed mode, and can't
actually be available for BMC management (thus no IPMI over the network). In my
case, the tests were wrongly failing at 'A07', a test which tries to establish
a Gigabit connection! Strangely, all these servers are connected on a Gb
switch! Not a fully satisfactory answer, but that said, there is a solution,
and I've not much time to pour into this investigation (comments may always
change my mind though!).

So here is a comprehensive procedure to fix this, from your Linux system,
and using FreeDOS:

Get a USB key, at least 1,44 Mb (damn!), but a good old 32Gb will also do
the trick

Open a terminal and format the USB key (WARNING: this will ERASE all data
on the key! You've been warned. Really!)

$ mkfs.msdos /dev/sdX1

Note: 'X' is to be replaced by the exact name of your USB key. An hint: call
'tail -f /var/log/syslog" and unplug / replug your USB key. You will see some
entries like "...sdb Attached SCSI removable
disk". So, there, it's "sdb".

For what it's worth (again), I just hope that it will be useful to
others...

I will now prepare another post using using FreeIPMI to manage your
servers, the GNU way...

cheers,
-- Arno

Thanks to Jordi Clariana, his enlightening post, Daniel for this one, Aurélien was motivating me again in solving this
iDrac Express issue and Al Chu (FreeIPMI project leader) for all his invaluable
help on IPMI.

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